To a landsman, the launching of one of these heavy, lug-sailed, undecked boats off such a beach as this, in a raging surf such as these shores alone can know in time of storm, is a marvel. The breakers are coming in snarling and screaming, in cruel, curving walls of water from whose crests the wind whips off the stinging brine that flies through the hurrying air in particles half in the likeness of sleet and half in that of fog. Here, and at such times, if anywhere, is-- “The scream of a madden’d beach dragged down by the wave”-- so finely phrased by Tennyson, in _Maud_, to be heard. A launch would seem impossible, but down the beach the galley-punt is run, her keel scrunching through the pebbles with a hurrying roar that rises even above the clamour of wind and waves, and in a moment she is off, her crew of three leaping or tumbling in like jumping-jacks, and in another moment she is clear of the breakers and heading out to where some steamer is dimly seen rolling and pitching yonder in the obscurity, flying a signal for the landing of the pilot, who has brought her round from the port of London and has now finished his job and is going home by train, as the custom is with pilots. To such work as this did the Deal boatmen’s lives come: hard work, and often hazardous; and, considering the casual nature of it, not well paid. Landing a pilot is, or was, worth twenty-five to thirty shillings or thereabouts, and it is obvious that this sum, casually earned and divided among a crew of three, is a poor recompense. But even this standby has been snatched away from the Deal boatmen since the Trinity House has established a steam pilot-cutter at Dover, which cruises about to land pilots from outward-bound ships at a fixed charge of £1. It is an excellent institution from the pilots’ point of view, but it is the last blow to the boatmen of Deal. Steam has ever been their enemy.